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It’s almost hard to remember when Joker (2019, dir. Todd Phillips) appeared the screens and became a massive box office hit. Within just a few short weeks, the COVID-19 pandemic smacked the world in the head and flipped everything upside down.
Even more difficult to recall is that public opinion was almost evenly divided. Half the public saw it as a reactionary picture, including both editors at Washington Babylon, while others thought it was a magnificent proletarian epic, including Counterpunch Radio podcast host Eric Draitser, who we urge you to support via his Patreon.
So this past weekend, Eric and I decided to sit down and hash out our differences while watching the movie and recorded the conversation, which we now present to you as an .MP3 audio file you can purchase for the low price of $1 plus tax and put on while watching the film. We have radically different readings of the film and its conclusion that hopefully will make for an enjoyable listening experience. Both of come from an angle defined in part by Marxist thought and so we talked about everyone from Lenin to Fanon to Walter Benjamin, all of whom have some really important insights about topics that arise in the film, such as violence, the state, and worker rebellions. However, we also tried dabbling in some psychoanalytic, feminist, and other frames of reference to beef things up.
I really enjoyed this and will be doing some more of these, such as a chat with a certain Marxist film critic of unrepentant repute regarding a particular Chinese wuxia film of tremendous import to contemporary debates.
To be clear, this isn’t anywhere near a definitive statement on the movie and I would love to have more conversations about it with people. For instance, there’s a lot of fertile ground for a Black feminist thinker to explore some of the plot points that can very fairly be read as misogynoir. A queer theorist could go to town on the homoeroticism of both the individual film and the wider superhero genre. A postmodern/post-structural thinker could say a lot of other things that would end up confusing 99% of the listeners. Film criticism is a great opportunity for debate and discourse that can get quite passionate but also end up with some very civil dialogue that people learn things about themselves from.
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DISCLAIMER/INSTRUCTIONS
This is an .MP3 track that does not contain any proprietary material owned by Warner Bros. Pictures, DC Films, Joint Effort, Bron Creative or Village Roadshow Pictures. It is created as an independently-recorded Audio Commentary Track that can be played simultaneous with JOKER (2019, dir. Todd Phillips). This is not a pirated copy of the film. We encourage you to obtain the film through legal means. This recording in no way is an endorsement of copyright violation and should not be construed as such in any way.
You should load this file onto an .MP3 player, be it a mobile device or similar system. Then you should cue up your copy of the film and PAUSE it at the start.
The audio file begins with a brief introduction, including audio instructions. At the sound of a BEEP on the file, you should push PLAY on the video viewing system you are using to watch the film. Once you do that, sit back, relax, and enjoy the film.
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